Mon. October 1
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The Culture of Cheating
The New York Times recently reported on a culture of cheating at Stuyvesant, one of New York City’s most prestigious public schools and the alma mater of four Nobel laureates. In interviews, dozens of students, alumni, and teachers said that an episode this summer, in which nearly eighty juniors were caught exchanging answers to exams via text messages, might be rare at the school but that cheating on a smaller scale was a daily occurrence.
The school’s paper conducted a survey of 2,045 students in March; 80 percent said they had cheated. Usually it takes the form of homework answers copied or tip-offs from classmates who took an earlier exam. They use sophisticated modern methods, like Googling facts on an iPhone, sharing notes on Facebook, or sharing cell phone pictures of exams. “Writing on your hand, that’s kiddie stuff,” said one senior. The school has anticheating measures, like checking for cell phones, but sympathetic teachers dispense light punishment or none at all.
The students say the social currency at Stuyvesant is academic achievement. It’s a demanding environment, but surprisingly, the cheating takes the form more of collaboration than competition. A school newspaper editorial described it as “an act of communal resistance” to a system they feel is designed to grind them down. “I’m sure everybody understood it was wrong to take other people’s work, but they had ways of rationalizing it,” said a 2010 graduate. “Everyone took it as a necessary evil to get through.”
As freshmen, students quickly learn that they must make not just mathematical calculations, but moral ones: weighing one class against another of lesser importance, weighing the possibility of getting an A against the possibility of getting caught, weighing their integrity against the Holy Grail of a dream college and a dream job. The cheaters often feel that the answer, as one put it, “is to kind of botch your ethics for a couple things.”
Two years ago the student newspaper published an editorial called “Why We Cheat,” which acknowledged that “academic dishonesty is firmly entrenched in the culture of Stuyvesant,” but which placed the blame largely on the system itself. The editorial urged Stuyvesant to shift the learning emphasis from “quantifiable, statistical achievement towards a more humanistic emphasis on analysis and critical thought,” and to make academic dishonesty a constant part of the dialogue in class to drive home the point that “academic dishonesty is a serious transgression that poisons the learning environment.” Almost as an afterthought, the article also urged students themselves to face their academic challenges with “full moral rectitude.”
The “full moral rectitude” part is easier said than done, especially for students raised in today’s anything-goes environment in which “shame” has lost much of its power to steer people toward good behavior. Our pop culture is particularly bad about transmitting mixed messages; reality TV, for example, often rewards bad behavior.
The problem of cheating is much broader than Stuyvesant High School, of course, or even than the field of education; it’s a human failing that seeps into virtually every arena of endeavor. Conquering it and preventing a culture of cheating is a challenge that begins not with our authorities or our peers, but with ourselves as individuals.
What those Stuyvesant students need in order to confront that temptation to “kind of botch your ethics” is not just a less intense learning environment, but a deep appreciation of just how corrosive cheating is on a personal level. They need to recognize that caving in to easy rationalizations like “everyone else is doing it” is a self-betrayal that leaves their character diminished. They must take to heart the lesson that, in the end, academic achievement through cheating is no achievement at all, and leaves their personal integrity in shards.
Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.
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What is described wouldn’t be “cheating” in a different environment, such as a work environment. It would be collaboration and that’s the holy grail of education these days.
I’ve gone back to college and this morning I was talking to another lady who was trying to write a paper. “I’m so worried about getting in trouble for plagiarizing,” she said. And we talked about how you’re supposed to write papers where you pretty much recreate what someone else has done but in your own words and with citations and you know it’s not *yours* but that’s what the assignment is. In one of my classes we need to write an article with an illustration and one girl asked if she was *allowed* to make her own illustration.
I’m not at all convinced that the blurring of lines between cheating and not is something that students have done. Students aren’t encouraged to work on their own work and they aren’t graded on their own work because someone decided that what we really need is to teach “teaming”.
So the students “team.”
Are we surprised?
The culture of cheating began in the late 60s and early 70s. It has been endemic since then and extends into all areas of our lives.
So how many ways can you spell bull “puckies”. Four years of college produces uneducated, miseducated students with degress in non sciences like sociology and various “studies”. Totally worthless, and graduate are incapable of doing simple jobs and want to be paid 60K a year because they have a certificate of attendance.
Tests are there to determine whether you have gained the knowledge and acumen to the level expected. Sharing answers undermines the ability to know the truth about the student. The better way is to learn the material, not the cell number of a person who studied harder and is willing to help.
Who you know is part of what you know, yes?
That’s what Stuyvesant teaches – who you know is as important, more important, than what you know.
For that matter, that’s what all of academics teaches. The “who” in academia is simply footnoted dead people instead of living people you text on your iPhone. If you know the Great Books or the Politically Correct Books, then you know the right people, even if you’ve never met them. You footnote them in order to “prove” that you “met” them.
In that sense, collaborating on an answer via iPhone is moving information from personal memory (as Plato required) to book memory (what books have you read?) and now to interpersonal memory (who do you know that can get this done for us?).
In a society that values lobbying and social connections, people are (rightly) hired for their social connections more than the book knowledged that can be Googled at the speed of light.
Using books would have been “cheating” according to Plato. Now using iPhones is “cheating” according to us old fogeys.
Students cheat because they value grades but do not value learning. This is not new today; it’s just more prevalent. The solution is simple: use essay or problem-based exams that test learning (rather than memorization) and are nearly impossible to cheat on if the proctor is observant.
Plagiarism on assignments is a tougher problem. My approach would be to treat writing assignments as learning tools. They would be weighted much less than exams. Students who plagiarize might get good grades on the assignments but are likely to do poorly on the essay-based exams.
I never cheated in high school.
I have lied since then, however.
It’s unrealistic to expect secondary school students to possess a monk-like devotion to solitude and burning the midnight oil. Assignments that prolong the work day until nine or ten o’clock every night of the week are going to encourage cutting corners.
It makes more sense to have the *collaborative* projects assigned for outside classroom hours, while the *individual* assignments should take place in class. This is exactly opposite of how things appear (anecdotally, at least) to be structured in today’s schools.
More to the point: we cannot marinate entire generations in hedonism and yet expect them to abide by Christian or Stoic ethics. We don’t even teach the *concept* of virtue anymore, much less name the classical virtues as absolutes to which everyone should aspire; we only teach relativistic ‘values’, lest we offend against multiculturalism by shaming those cultures that call good evil and evil good.
right…….dumb down……good for you.
You missed the point completely. At no time was I advocating reducing the subject matter taught.
There are a few cases (e.g. basic arithmetic) in which instant subconscious access to a skill is essential for further progress. In these cases, there is no substitute for drill and repetition to build proficiency. In other cases, ability to recall facts is less important than ability to analyze and solve given a set of facts. Here, repetition is counterproductive (negative training) until the method is fully understood. The point is, teachers should not be teaching analysis the same way they teach rote knowledge.
But that is addressing only the *practical* problem of reducing cheating. The *moral* problem (cf. my final paragraph above) can’t be addressed until our culture understands what is really worth teaching. That ‘dumbing down’ started occurred at least fifty years ago, and we’re living with the consequences.
Considering that the majority of educators today are frequently seen putting their personal interests ahead of those of their students or the requirements of their positions (as recently showcased in Chicago), why should the students be expected to demonstrate a stronger ethos than their teachers do?
Or has it been supposed that students don’t notice anything but what the teachers intentionally teach?
You know what they say, “If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying.”
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